Counternarcotics

Agents of the Office of Customs and Border Protection, confiscated this morning 2.3 tonnes of Marijuana in a sophisticated narco tunnel located in the city of Naco, Arizona, 355 kilometres north east of the Sonora Capital.

On Monday, the State Department sent to Congress more details about its big request for US$1 billion in 2016 assistance to Central America, as part of next year's foreign aid budget proposal. Compared to 2014, this US$1 billion package would mean a tripling of foreign aid budget assistance to the region, especially to the three "Northern Triangle" countries (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras), which suffer very high violent crime levels.

Paraguayan national police and the Senad drug enforcement agency burned Monday a total of 1,212 kilos (1 1/3 tons) of cocaine seized in different operations between 2013 and the first days of this year.

The sad truth is that the Western war on drug production in Afghanistan over the past 13 years has been a disaster. Afghanistan’s post-Soviet neighbors – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are nervously pondering how the drawdown of foreign troops in Afghanistan to one-tenth the size of their 2010 deployments will affect this trade, so destabilizing for regional security.

With their hands and feet bound, the two dead men who were recently found by police officers in the trunk of a Peugeot compact car seemed at first like many other victims on the streets of Manaus, the Amazon’s largest city.

President Juan Manuel Santos caused a stir this week when he told an interviewer from Colombia’s RCN Radio network that the country would have to alter its laws to benefit FARC members who have trafficked drugs.